Jude Milhon (St. Jude)
termops cultureprivacy
The self-taught programmer and civil-rights activist who helped build Community Memory - the first public computerised bulletin board, in 1970s Berkeley - coined the word cypherpunk, and wrote as St. Jude in Mondo 2000.
Milhon insisted that hacking was 'the clever circumvention of imposed limits', a definition that covers code, bodies and laws with equal force, and she spent her life pushing back on the scene's boy-club default - her advice to women entering it was blunt, funny and widely reprinted. She is the corrective to a history told as a list of young men: the culture's vocabulary, its earliest public network and a good part of its politics came from her.
Also known as: st jude, cypherpunk coiner, community memory, mondo 2000